The Year of Living Danishly – a review

I know many of you are like me in that you love a good project. Even better when someone else does a great project and writes about it, right?

Examples of this genre that I love are The Happiness Project (for a few years after, some of my clients did their own happiness projects which I coached them through, and then I could re-live the book many times over – LOVE!!!), Happier at Home and the one I want to talk about today, The Year of Living Danishly.

In a nutshell, Helen Russell’s husband gets a job in Denmark at Lego (!), they go for the year. Helen is a journalist and during this year, she freelances while doing her Living Danishly project, one focus area each month. The Danes are known to be some of the happiest people in the world so the book explores that too – each person she interviews gets asked for their happiness score on a scale of 1 – 10.

I read the book through Audible and it was fabulous – the narrator is really, really good.

There’s a lot of talk about hygge – one of my favourite topics – because the Danes do this really well.

I wrote about hygge here and here, if you’d like to have a read.

The 10 concepts she explores in the book, and why Danes are so happy are:

  1. Trust more
  2. Live Hygge
  3. Use your body
  4. Address the aesthetics
  5. Streamline your options
  6. Be proud
  7. Value family
  8. Equal respect for equal work (I’d heard some of this research before from “Overwhelmed” – Brigid Schulte, a book I gave 5 stars)
  9. Play
  10. Share

I don’t want to say too much more, except if you’re going to read it, I recommend the audible version if you like a good English accent. However, if you’re not sure about audible, then get the kindle copy.

Hope you enjoy reading.

Have you read this book? What did you think? Which of the 10 do you most resonate with?

PS if you know of other similar project/ memoir-type books, do leave me a comment so I can check them out.

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Comments

  1. I also love books like that. I imagine you’ve read Julie & Julia and Cleaving, but if not, those are good. I also recommend The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading. Not quite the same, but one of the best books that I’ve read this year. On my to read list is My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew.

  2. I loved it too! But I have to imagine it must have felt different reading it coming from a non-US country 🙂 Are there parallels between S Africa and Denmark? You could definitely tell how the author felt about the US. Ha! (Which I generally agree with, but it was funny to see her negativity so strong throughout when she hadn’t actually lived here!)

Trackbacks

  1. […] And feel free to recommend books to me too in the women’s fiction, psychological thriller and memoir range. I’m also looking for a good memoir/ project book like this one. […]

  2. […] Project-based memoir […]

  3. […] Then there’s a subgenre of memoir that I love – it’s one where there’s a project for a certain length of time – and the author then writes a book about…. […]

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